University of Virginia Library

PEDLAR KARL.

— L'Evangile des Femmes.

I am not sure whether Lebanon Springs, the scene
of a romantic story I am about to tell, belong to New
York or Massachusetts. It is not very important, to
be sure, in a country where people take Vermont and
Patagonia to be neighboring states, but I have a natural
looseness in geography which I take pains to mortify
by exposure. Very odd that I should not remember
more of the spot where I took my first lessons in
philandering! — where I first saw you, brightest and
most beautiful A. D. (not Anno Domini), in your white
morning-frocks and black French aprons!

Lebanon Springs are the rage about once in three
years. I must let you into the secret of these things,
gentle reader, for perhaps I am the only individual
existing who has penetrated the mysteries of the four
dyansties of American fashion. In the fourteen millions
of inhabitants in the United States, there are
precisely four authenticated and undisputed aristocratic
families. There is one in Boston, one in New
York, one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. By
a blessed Providence they are not all in one state, or
we should have a civil war and a monarchy in no time.
With two hundred miles' interval between them, they
agree passably, and generally meet at one or another
of the three watering-places of Saratoga, Ballston, or
Lebanon. Their meeting is as mysterious as the process
of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. You
must explain it by some theory of homœopathy or
magnetism. As it is not known till the moment they
arrive, there is of course great excitement among the
hotel-keepers in these different parts of the country,
and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabitants
one summer, has, for the next, scarcely as many
score. The vast and solitary temples of Pæstum are
gay in comparison with these halls of disappointment.

As I make a point of dawdling away July and August
in this locomotive metropolis of pleasure, and
rather prefer Lebanon, it is always agreeable to me to
hear that the nucleus is formed in that valley of hemlocks.
Not for its scenery, for really, my dear east
ern-hemispherian! you that are accustomed to what
is called nature in England (to wit, a soft park, with a
gray ruin in the midst), have little idea how wearily
upon heart and mind presses a waste wilderness of
mere forest and water, without stone or story. Trees
in England have characters and tongues; if you see a
fine one, you know whose father planted it, and for
whose pleasure it was designed, and about what sum
the man must possess to afford to let it stand. They
are statistics, as it were — so many trees, ergo so many
owners so rich. In America, on the contrary, trees
grow and waters run, as the stars shine, quite unmeaningly;
there may be ten thousand princely elms, and
not a man within a hundred miles worth five pounds
five. You ask, in England, who has the privilege of
this water? or you say of an oak, that it stood in such
a man's time: but with us, water is an element unclaimed
and unrented, and a tree dabbles in the clouds
as they go over, and is like a great idiot, without soul
or responsibility.

If Lebanon had a history, however, it would have
been a spot for a pilgrimage, for its natural beauty.
It is shaped like a lotus, with one leaf laid back by
the wind. It is a great green cup, with a scoop for a
drinking-place. As you walk in the long porticoes of
the hotel, the dark forest mounts up before you like a
leafy wall, and the clouds seem just to clear the pine-tops,
and the eagles sail across from horizon to horizon,
without lifting their wings, as if you saw them
from the bottom of a well. People born there think
the world about two miles square, and hilly.

The principal charm of Lebanon to me is the village
of “shakers,” lying in a valley about three miles
off. As Glaucus wondered at the inert tortoise of
Pompeii, and loved it for its antipodal contrast to himself,
so do I affection (a French verb that I beg leave
to introduce to the English language) the shaking
quakers. That two thousand men could be found in
the New World, who would embrace a religion enjoining
a frozen and unsympathetic intercourse with
the diviner sex, and that an equal number of females
could be induced to live in the same community, without
locks or walls, in the cold and rigid observance
of a creed of celibacy, is to me an inexplicable and
grave wonder. My delight is to get into my stanhope
after breakfast, and drive over and spend the forenoon
in contemplating them at their work in the fields
They have a peculiar and most expressive physiogno

my; the women are pale, or of a wintry redness in
the cheek, and are all attenuated and spare. Gravity,
deep and habitual, broods in every line of their thin
faces. They go out to their labor in company with
those serious men, and are never seen to smile; their
eyes are all hard and stony, their gait is precise and
stiff, their voices are of a croaking hoarseness, and nature
seems dead in them. I would bake you such men
and women in a brick-kiln.

Do they think the world is coming to an end? Are
there to be no more children? Is Cupid to be thrown
out of business, like a coach proprietor on a railroad?
What can the shakers mean, I should be pleased to
know?

The oddity is that most of them are young. Men
of from twenty to thirty, and women from sixteen to
twenty-five, and often, spite of their unbecoming dress,
good-looking and shapely, meet you at every step. Industrious,
frugal, and self-denying, they certainly are,
and there is every appearance that their tenets of
difficult abstinence are kept to the letter. There is
little temptation beyond principle to remain, and they
are free to go and come as they list, yet there they
live on in peace and unrepining industry, and a more
thriving community does not exist in the republic.
Many a time have I driven over on a Sunday, and
watched those solemn virgins dropping in one after
another to the church; and when the fine-limbed and
russet-faced brotherhood were swimming round the
floor in their fanatical dance, I have watched their
countenances for some look of preference, some betrayal
of an ill-suppressed impulse, till my eyes ached
again. I have selected the youngest and fairest, and
have not lost sight of her for two hours, and she
might have been made of cheese-parings for any trace
of emotion. There is food for speculation in it. Can
we do without matrimony? Can we “strike,” and be
independent of these dear delightful tyrants, for whom
we “live and move and have our being?” Will it
ever be no blot on our escutcheon to have attained
thirty-five as an unfructifying unit? Is that fearful
campaign, with all its embarrassments and awkwardnesses,
and inquisitions into your money and morals,
its bullyings and backings-out — is it inevitable?

Lebanon has one other charm. Within a morning
drive of the springs lies the fairest village it has ever
been my lot to see. It is English in its character,
except that there is really nothing in this country
so perfect of its kind. There are many towns in the
United States more picturesquely situated, but this,
before I had been abroad, always seemed to me the
very ideal of English rural scenery, and the kind of
place to set apart for either love or death — for one's
honeymoon or burial — the two periods of life which
I have always hoped would find me in the loveliest
spot of nature. Stockbridge lies in a broad sunny
valley, with mountains at exactly the right distance,
and a river in its bosom that is as delicate in its windings,
and as suited to the charms it wanders among,
as a vein in the transparent neck of beauty. I am
not going into a regular description, but I have carried
myself back to Lebanon; and the remembrance
of the leafy mornings of summer in which I have
driven to that fair earthly paradise, and loitered under
its elms, imagining myself amid the scenes of song
and story in distant England, has a charm for me now.
I have seen the mother-land; I have rambled through
park, woodland, and village, wherever the name was
old and the scene lovely, and it pleases me to go back
to my dreaming days and compare the reality with the
anticipation. Most small towns in America have traces
of newness about them. The stumps of a clearing, or
freshly-boarded barns — something that is the antipodes
of romance — meets your eye from every aspect. Stockbridge,
on the contrary, is an old town, and the houses
are of a rural structure; the fields look soft and genial
the grass is swardlike, the bridges picturesque, the
hedges old, and the elms, nowhere so many and so
luxuriant, are full-grown and majestic. The village
is embowered in foliage.

Greatest attraction of all, the authoress of “Redwood”
and “Hope Leslie,” a novelist of whom America has
the good sense to be proud, is the Miss Mitford of Stockbridge.
A man, though a distinguished one, may have
little influence on the town he lives in, but a remarkable
woman is the invariable cynosure of a community,
and irradiates it all. I think I could divine the presence
of one almost by the growing of the trees and flowers.
“Our Village” does not look like other villages.

2. II.

You will have forgotten that I had a story to tell,
dear reader. I was at Lebanon in the summer of —
(perhaps you don't care about knowing exactly when
it was, and in that case I would rather keep shy of
dates. I please myself with the idea that time gets on
faster than I). The Springs were thronged. The
president's lady was there (this was under our administration,
the Adams'), and all the four cliques spoken
of above were amicably united — each other's beaux
dancing with each other's belles, and so on. If I were
writing merely for American eyes, I should digress
once more to describe the distinctive characters of the
south, north, and central representations of beauty;
but it would scarcely interest the general reader. I
may say, in passing, that the Boston belles were à
l'Anglaise, rosy and riantes; the New-Yorkers, like
Parisians, cool, dangerous, and dressy; and the Baltimoreans
(and so south), like Ionians or Romans, indolent,
passionate, lovely, and languishing. Men,
women, and pine-apples, I am inclined to think, flourish
with a more kindly growth in the fervid latitudes.

The campaign went on, and a pleasant campaign it
was — for the parties concerned had the management
of their own affairs; that is, they who had hearts to
sell made the bargain for themselves (this was the
greater number), and they who disposed of this commodity
gratis, though necessarily young and ignorant
of the world, made the transfer in the same manner, in
person. This is your true republic. The trading in
affections by reference — the applying to an old and
selfish heart for the purchase of a young and ingenuous
one — the swearing to your rents, and not to your
faithful passion — to your settlements, and not your
constancy — the cold distance between yourself and
the young creature who is to lie in your bosom, till
the purchase-money is secured — and the hasty marriage
and sudden abandonment of a nature thus
chilled and put on its guard, to a freedom with one
almost a stranger, that can not but seem licentious,
and can not but break down that sense of propriety in
which modesty is most strongly intrenched — this
seems to me the one evil of your old worm-eaten monarchies
this side the water, which touches the essential
happiness of the well-bred individual. Taxation
and oppression are but things he reads of in the morning
paper.

This freedom of intercourse between unmarried
people has a single disadvantage — one gets so desperately
soon to the end of the chapter! There shall be
two hundred young ladies at the Springs in a given
season, and, by the difference in taste so wisely arranged
by Providence, there will scarcely be, of course,
more than four in that number whom any one gentleman
at all difficult will find within the range of his
beau ideal. With these four he may converse freely
twelve hours in the day — more, if he particularly desires
it. They may ride together, drive together, ramble
together, sing together, be together from morning

till night, and at the end of a month passed in this way,
if he escape a committal, as is possible, he will know
all that are agreeable, in one large circle, at least, as well
as he knows his sisters — a state of things that is very
likely to end in his going abroad soon, from a mere
dearth of amusement. I have imagined, however,
the case of an unmarrying idle man, a character too
rare as yet in America to affect the general question.
People marry as they die in that country — when their
time come. We must all marry is as much an axiom
as we must all die, and eke as melancholy.

Shall we go on with the story? I had escaped for
two blessed weeks, and was congratulating the susceptible
gentleman under my waistcoat-pocket that we
should never be in love with less than the whole sex
again, when a German Baron Von — arrived at
the Springs with a lame daughter. She was eighteen,
transparently fair, and, at first sight, so shrinkingly
dependant, so delicate, so childlike, that attention to
her assumed the form almost of pity, and sprang as
naturally and unsuspectingly from the heart. The
only womanly trait about her was her voice, which
was so deeply soft and full, so earnest and yet so gentle,
so touched with subdued pathos and yet so melancholy
calm, that if she spoke after a long silence, I
turned to her involuntarily with the feeling that she
was not the same — as if some impassioned and eloquent
woman had taken unaware the place of the
simple and petted child.

I am inclined to think there is a particular tenderness
in the human breast for lame women. Any
other deformity in the gentler sex is monstrous; but
lameness (the devil's defect) is “the devil.” I picture
to myself, to my own eye, now — pacing those rickety
colonnades at Lebanon with the gentle Meeta hanging
heavily, and with the dependance inseparable from
her infirmity, on my arm, while the moon (which was
the moon of the Rhine to her, full of thrilling and unearthly
influences) rode solemnly up above the mountain-tops.
And that strange voice filling like a flute
with sweetness as the night advanced, and that irregular
pressure of the small wrist in her forgotten lameness,
and my own (I thought) almost paternal feeling
as she leaned more and more heavily, and turned her
delicate and fair face confidingly up to mine, and that
dangerous mixture altogether of childlikeness and
womanly passion, of dependance and superiority, of
reserve on the one subject of love, and absolute confidence
on every other — if I had not a story to tell, I
could prate of those June nights and their witcheries
till you would think

and myself “bitten by the dipsas.”

We were walking one night late in the gallery running
around the second story of the hotel. There was
a ball on the floor below, and the music, deadened
somewhat by the crowded room, came up softened and
mellowed to the dark and solitary colonnade, and added
to other influences in putting a certain lodger in my
bosom beyond my temporary control. I told Meeta
that I loved her.

The building stands against the side of a steep mountain
high up above the valley, and the pines and hemlocks
at that time hung in their primeval blackness
almost over the roof. As the most difficult and embarrassed
sentence of which I had ever been delivered
died on my lips, and Meeta, lightening her weight on
my arm, walked in apparently offended silence by my
side, a deep-toned guitar was suddenly struck in the
woods, and a clear, manly voice broke forth in a song.
It produced an instant and startling effect on my companion.
With the first word she quickly withdrew
her arm; and, after a moment's pause, listening with
her hands raised in an attitude of the most intense eagerness,
she sprang to the extremity of the balustrade,
and gazed breathlessly into the dark depths of the forest.
The voice ceased, and she started back, and laid
her hand hastily upon my arm.

“I must go,” she said, in a voice of hurried feeling;
“if you are generous, stay here and await me!” and in
another moment she sprang along the bridge connecting
the gallery with the rising ground in the rear, and
was lost in the shadows of the hemlocks.

“I have made a declaration,” thought I, “just five
minutes too soon.”

I paced up and down the now too lonely colonnade,
and picked up the fragments of my dream with what
philosophy I might. by the time Meeta returned —
perhaps a half hour, perhaps an age, as you measure
by her feelings or mine — I had hatched up a very pretty
and heroical magnanimity. She would have spoken,
but was breathless.

“Explain nothing,” I said, taking her arm within
mine, “and let us mutually forget. If I can serve you
better than by silence, command me entirely. I live
but for your happiness — even,” I added after a pause,
“though it spring from another.”

We were at her chamber-door. She pressed my
hand with a strength of which I did not think those
small, slight fingers capable, and vanished, leaving me,
I am free to confess, less resigned than you would suppose
from my last speech. I had done the dramatic
thing, thanks to much reading of you, dear Barry
Cornwall! but it was not in a play. I remained killed
after the audience was gone.

3. III.

The next day a new character appeared on the
stage.

“Such a handsome pedlar!” said magnificent Helen
— to me, as I gave my horse to the groom after
a ride in search of hellebore, and joined the promenade
at the well: “and what do you think? he sells
only by raffle! It's so nice! All sorts of Berlin iron
ornaments, and everything German and sweet; and
the pedlar's smile's worth more than the prizes; and
such a mustache! See! there he is! — and now, if
he has sold all his tickets — will you come, Master
Gravity?”

“I hear a voice you can not hear,” thought I, as I
gave the beauty my arm, and joined a crowd of people
gathered about a pedlar's box in the centre of the
parterre.

The itinerant vender spread his wares in the midst
of the gay assemblage, and the raffle went on. He
was excessively handsome. A head of the sweet gentleness
of Raphael's, with locks flowing to his shoulders
in the fashion of German students, a soft brown
mustache curving on a short Phidian upper lip, a
large blue eye expressive of enthusiasm rather than
passion, and features altogether purely intellectual —
formed a portrait of which even jealousy might console
itself. Through all the disadvantages of a dress
suited to his apparent vocation, an eye the least on
the alert for a disguise would have penetrated his in
a moment. The gay and thoughtless crowd about
him, not accustomed to impostors who were more than
they pretended to be, trusted him for a pedlar, but
treated him with a respect far above his station insensibly.

Whatever his object was, so it were honorable, I
inly determined to give him all the assistance in my
power. A single glance at the face of Meeta, who
joined the circle as the prizes were drawn — a face so
changed since yesterday, so flushed with hope and
pleasure, and yet so saddened by doubt and fear, the
small lips compressed, the soft black eye kindled and

restless, and the red leaf on her cheek deepened to a
feverish beauty — left me no shadow of hesitation. I
exchanged a look with her that I intended should say
as much.

4. IV.

I know nothing that gives one such an elevated idea
of human nature (in one's own person) as helping
another man to a woman one loves. Oh last days of
minority or thereabout! oh primal manhood! oh
golden time, when we have let go all but the enthusiasm
of the boy, and seized hold of all but the selfishness
of the man! oh blessed interregnum of the
evil and stronger genius! why can we not bottle up
thy hours like the wine of a better vintage, and enjoy
them in the parched world-weariness of age? In the
tardy honeymoon of a bachelor (as mine will be, if it
come ever, alas!) with what joy of paradise should we
bring up from the cellars of the past a hamper of that
sunny Hippocrene!

Pedlar Karl and “the gentleman in No. 10” would
have been suspected in any other country of conspiracy.
(How odd, that the highest crime of a monarchy
— the attempt to supplant the existing ruler — becomes
in a republic a creditable profession! You are a traitor
here, a politician there!) We sat together from
midnight onward, discoursing in low voices over sherry
and sandwiches; and in that crowded Babylon, his
entrances and exits required a very conspirator-like
management. Known as my friend, his trade and his
disguise were up. As a pedlar, wandering about
where he listed when not employed over his wares, his
interviews with Meeta were easily contrived, and his
lover's watch, gazing on her through the long hours
of the ball from the crowd of villagers at the windows,
hovering about her walks, and feeding his heart on
the many, many chance looks of fondness given him
every hour in that out-of-doors society, kept him comparatively
happy.

“The baron looked hard at you to-day,” said I, as
he closed the door in my little room, and sat down on
the bed.

“Yes; he takes an interest in me as a countryman,
but he does not know me. He is a dull observer, and
has seen me but once in Germany.”

“How, then, have you known Meeta so long?”

“I accompanied her brother home from the university,
when the baron was away, and for a long month
we were seldom parted. Riding, boating on the Rhine,
watching the sunset from the bartizan of the old castletowers,
reading in the old library, rambling in the park
and forest — it was a heaven, my friend, than which I
can conceive none brighter.”

“And her brother?”

“Alas! changed! We were both boys then, and a
brother is slow to believe his sister's beauty dangerous.
He was the first to shut the doors against me, when
he heard that the poor student had dared to love his
highborn Meeta.”

Karl covered his eyes with his hand, and brooded
for a while in silence on the remembrances he had
awakened.

“Do you think the baron came to America purposely
to avoid you?”

“Partly, I have no doubt, for I entered the castle
one night in my despair, when I had been forbidden
entrance, and he found me at her feet in the old corridor.
It was the only time he ever saw me, if, indeed,
he saw me at all in the darkness: and he immediately
hastened his preparations for a long-contemplated
journey, I knew not whither.”

“Did you follow him soon?”

“No, for my heart was crushed at first, and I despaired.
The possibility of following them in my
wretched poverty did not even occur to me for
months.”

“How did you track them hither, of all places in
the world?”

“I sought them first in Italy. It is easy on the
continent to find out where persons are not, and after
two years' wanderings, I heard of them in Paris.
They had just sailed for America. I followed; but
in a country where there are no passports, and no
espionage, it is difficult to trace the traveller. It was
probable only that they would be at a place of general
resort, and I came here with no assurance but hope.
Thanks to God, the first sight that greeted my eyes
was my dear Meeta, whose irregular step, as she
walked back and forth with you in the gallery, enabled
me to recognise her in the darkness.”

Who shall say the days of romance are over? The
plot is not brought to the catastrophe, but we hope it
is near.

5. V.

My aunt, Isabella Slingsby (now in heaven, with
the “eleven thousand virgins,” God rest her soul!),
was at this time, as at all others, under my respectable
charge. She would have said I was under hers —
but it amounts to the same thing — we lived together
in peace and harmony. She said what she pleased,
for I loved her — and I did what I pleased, for she
loved me. When Karl told me that Meeta's principal
objection to an elopement was the want of a matron,
I shut the teeth of my resolution, as they say in Persia,
and inwardly vowed my unconscious aunt to this
exigency. You should have seen Miss Isabella Slingsby
to know what a desperate man may be brought to
resolve on.

On a certain day, Count Von Raffle-off (as my witty
friend and ally, Tom Fane, was pleased to call the
handsome pedlar) departed with his pack and the
hearts of all the dressing-maids and some of their mistresses,
on his way to New York. I drove down the
road to take my leave of him out of sight, and give
him my last instructions.

How to attack my aunt was a subject about which
I had many unsatisfactory thoughts. If there was one
thing she disapproved of more than another, it was an
elopement; and with what face to propose to her to
run away with a baron's only daughter, and leave her
in the hands of a pedlar, taking upon herself, as she
must, the whole sin and odium, was an enigma I ate,
drank, and slept upon, in vain. One thing at last became
very clear — she would do it for nobody but me.
Sequitur, I must play the lover myself.

I commenced with a fit of illness. What was the
matter? For two days I was invisible. Dear Isabella!
it was the first time I had ever drawn seriously on thy
fallow sympathies, and, how freely they flowed at my
affected sorrows, I shame to remember! Did ever
woman so weep? Did ever woman so take antipathy
to man as she to that innocent old baron for his supposed
refusal of his daughter to Philip Slingsby? This
revival of the remembrance shall not be in vain. The
mignonette and roses planted above thy grave, dearest
aunt, shall be weeded anew!

Oh that long week of management and hypocrisy!
The day came at last.

“Aunt Bel!”

“What, Philip, dear?”

“I think I feel better to-day.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. What say you to a drive? There is the
stanhope.”

“My dear Phil, don't mention that horrid stanhope.
I am sure, if you valued my life — ”

“Precisely, aunt — (I had taken care to give her a

good fright the day before) — but Tom Fane has offered
me his ponies and Jersey wagon, and that, you know,
is the most quiet thing in the world, and holds four.
So, perhaps — ehem! — you'll — ask Meeta?”

“Um! Why, you see, Philip — ”

I saw at once, that, if it got to an argument, I was
perdu. Miss Slingsby, though a sincere Christian,
never could keep her temper when she tried to reason.
I knelt down on her footstool, smoothed away the false
hair on her forehead and kissed her. It was a fascinating
endearment of mine, that I only resorted to on
great emergencies. The hermit tooth in my aunt's
mouth became gradually visible, heralding what in
youth had been a smile; and, as I assisted her in rolling
up her embroidery, she looked on me with an unsuspecting
affection that touched my heart. I made
a silent vow that if she survived the scrape into which
she was being inveigled, I would be to her and her
dog Whimsiculo (the latter my foe and my aversion)
the soul of exemplary kindness for the remainder of
their natural lives. I lay the unction to my soul that
this vow was kept. My aunt blessed me shortly before
she was called to “walk in white” (she had hitherto
walked in yellow), and as it would have been unnatural
in Whimsiculo to survive her, I considered his
“natural life” as ended with hers, and had him peacefully
strangled on the same day. He lies at her feet,
as usual, a delicate attention of which (I trust in Swedenborg)
her spirit is aware.

With the exception of “Tom Thumb” and “Rattler,”
who were of the same double-jointed family of
interminable wind and bottom, there was never perhaps
such a pair of goers as Tom Fane's ponies. My
aunt had a lurking hope, I believe, that the baron
would refuse Meeta permission to join us, but either
he did not think me a dangerous person (I have said
before he was a dull man), or he had no objection to
me as a son-in-law, which my aunt and myself (against
the world) would have thought the natural construction
upon his indifference. He came to the end of the
colonnade to see us start, and as I eased the ribands
and let the ponies off like a shot from a crossbow, I
stole a look at Meeta. The color had fled from cheek
and lip, and the tears streamed over them like rain.
Aunt Bel was on the back seat, grace à Dieu!

We met Tom at the foot of the hill, and I pulled
up. He was the best fellow, that Tom Fane!

“Ease both the bearing reins,” said I, “I am going
up the mountain.”

“The devil you are!” said Tom, doing my bidding,
however; “you'll find the road to the shakers much
pleasanter. What an odd whim! It's a perpendicular
three miles, Miss Slingsby. I would as lief be
hoisted up a well and let down again. Don't go that
way, Phil, unless you are going to run away with
Miss Von — ”

thought I, and waving the tandem lash over the ears
of the ponies, I brought up the silk on the cheek of
their malaprop master, and spanked away up the hill,
leaving him in a range likely to get a fresh supply of
fuel by dinner-time. Tom was of a plethoric habit,
and if I had not thought he could afford to burst a
blood-vessel better than two lovers to break their hearts,
I should not have ventured on the bold measure of
borrowing his horses for an hour, and keeping them a
week. We have shaken hands upon it since, but it is
my private opinion that he has never forgiven me in
his heart.

As we wound slowly up the mountain, I gave Meeta
the reins, and jumped out to gather some wild flowers
for my aunt. Dear old soul! the attention reconciled
her to what she considered a very unwarrantable caprice
of mine. What I could wish to toil up that
steep mountain for? Well! the flowers are charming
in these high regions!

“Don't you see my reason for coming, then, aunt
Bella?”

“Was it for that, dear Philip?” said she, putting
the wild flowers affectionately into her bosom, where
they bloomed like broidery on saffron tapestry; “how
considerate of you!” And she drew her shawl around
her, and was at peace with all the world. So easily
are the old made happy by the young! Reader, I
scent a moral in the air!

We were at the top of the hill. If I was sane, my
aunt was probably thinking, I should turn here, and
go back. To descend the other side, and reascend
and descend again to the Springs, was hardly a sort of
thing one would do for pleasure.

“Here's a good place to turn, Philip,” said she, as
we entered a smooth broad hollow on the top of the
mountain.

I dashed through it as if the ponies were shod with
talaria. My aunt said nothing, and luckily the road
was very narrow for a mile, and she had a horror of a
short turn. A new thought struck me.

“Did you ever know, aunt, that there was a way
back around the foot of the mountain?”

“Dear, no; how delightful! Is it far?”

“A couple of hours or so; but I can do it in less.
We'll try;” and I gave the sure-footed Canadians the
whip, and scampered down the hills as if the rock of
Sisyphus had been rolling after us.

We were soon over the mountain-range, and the
road grew better and more level. Oh, how fast pattered
those little hoofs, and how full of spirit, and
excitement looked those small ears, catching the
lightest chirrup I could whisper, like the very spell of
swiftness! Pines, hemlocks and cedars, farmhouses
and milestones, flew back like shadows. My aunt sat
speechless in the middle of the back seat, holding on
with both hands, in apprehensive resignation! She
expected soon to come in sight of the Springs, and
had doubtless taken a mental resolution that if, please
God, she once more found herself at home, she would
never “tempt Providence” (it was a favorite expression
of hers) by trusting herself again behind such a pair
of fly-away demons. As I read this thought in her
countenance by a stolen glance over my shoulder, we
rattled into a village distant from Lebanon twenty
miles.

“There, aunt,” said I, as I pulled up at the door of
the inn, “we have very nearly described a circle.
Now, don't speak! if you do, you'll start the horses.
There's nothing they are so much afraid of as a woman's
voice. Very odd, isn't it? We'll just sponge
their mouths now, and be at home in the crack of a
whip. Five miles more, only. Come!”

Off we sped again like the wind, aunt Bel just venturing
to wonder whether the horses wouldn't rather go
slower. Meeta had hardly spoken; she had thoughts
of her own to be busy with, and I pretended to be fully
occupied with my driving. The nonsense I talked to
those horses, to do away the embarrassment of her silence,
would convict me of insanity before any jury in
the world.

The sun began to throw long shadows, and the short-legged
ponies figured like flying giraffes along the retiring
hedges. Luckily, my aunt had very little idea
of conjecturing a course by the points of the compass.
We sped on gloriously.

“Philip, dear! hav'n't you lost your way? It seems
to me we've come more than five miles since you
stopped” (ten at least), “and I don't see the mountains
about Lebanon at all!”

“Don't be alarmed, aunty, dear! We're very high,
just here, and shall drop down on Lebanon, as it were.
Are you afraid, Meeta?”

“Nein!” she answered. She was thinking in German,
poor girl, and heart and memory were wrapped
up in the thought.

I drove on almost cruelly. Tom's incomparable
horses justified all his eulogiums; they were indefatigable.
The sun blazed a moment through the firs,
and disappeared; the gorgeous changes of eve came
over the clouds; the twilight stole through the damp
air with its melancholy gray; and the whippoorwills,
birds of evening, came abroad, like gentlemen in debt,
to flit about in the darkness. Everything was saddening.
My own volubility ceased; the whiz of the
lash, as I waved it over the heads, of my foaming ponies,
and an occasional “Steady!” as one or the other
broke into a gallop, were the only interruptions to the
silence. Meeta buried her face in the folds of her
shawl, and sat closer to my side, and my aunt, soothed
and flattered by turns, believed and doubted, and was
finally persuaded, by my ingenious and well-inserted
fibs, that it was only somewhat farther than I anticipated,
and we should arrive “presently.”

Somewhere about eight o'clock the lights of a town
appeared in the distance, and, straining every nerve,
the gallant beasts whirled us in through the streets,
and I pulled up suddenly at the door of an hotel.

“Why, Philip!” said my aunt in a tone of unutterable
astonishment, looking about her as if she had
awoke from a dream, “this is Hudson!”

It was too clear to be disputed. We were upon the
North river, forty miles from Lebanon, and the steamer
would touch at the pier in half an hour. My aunt
was to be one of the passengers to New York, but she
was yet to be persuaded of it; the only thing now was
to get her into the house, and enact the scene as soon
as possible.

I helped her out as tenderly as I knew how, and, as
we went up stairs, I requested Meeta to sit down in a
corner of the room, and cover her face with her handkerchief.
When the servant was locked out, I took
my aunt into the recess of the window, and informed
her, to her very great surprise, that she had run away
with the baron's daughter.

“Philip Slingsby!”

My aunt was overcome. I had nothing for it but to
be overcome too. She sunk into one chair, and I into
the other, and burying my face in my hands, I looked
through my fingers to watch the effect. Five mortal
minutes lasted my aunt's wrath; gradually, however,
she began to steal a look at me, and the expression of
resentment about her thin lips softened into something
like pity.

“Philip!” said she, taking my hand.

“My dear aunt!”

“What is to be done?”

I pointed to Meeta, who sat with her head on her
bosom, pressed my hand to my heart, as if to suppress
a pang, and proceeded to explain. It seemed impossible
for my aunt to forgive the deception of the thing.
Unsophisticated Isabella! If thou hadst known that
thou wert, even yet, one fold removed from the truth,
— if thou couldst have divined that it was not for the
darling of thy heart that thou wert yielding a point
only less dear to thee than thy maiden reputation —
if it could have entered thy region of possibilities that
thine own house in town had been three days aired
for the reception of a bride, run away with by thy ostensible
connivance, and all for a German pedlar, in
whose fortunes and loves thou hadst no shadow of
interest — I think the brain in thee would have turned,
and the dry heart in thy bosom have broken with surprise
and grief!

I wrote a note to Tom, left his horses at the inn,
and at nine o'clock we were steaming down the Hudson,
my aunt in bed, and Meeta pacing the deck with
me, and pouring forth her fears and her gratitude in
a voice of music that made me almost repent my self
sacrificing enterprise. I have told the story gayly,
gentle reader! but there was a nerve ajar in my heart
while its little events went on.

How we sped thereafter, dear reader! — how the
consul of his majesty of Prussia was persuaded by my
aunt's respectability to legalize the wedding by his
presence — how my aunt fainted dead away when the
parson arrived, and she discovered who was not to be
the bridegroom and who was — how I persuaded her
she had gone too far to recede, and worked on her tenderness
once more — how the weeping Karl, and his
lame and lovely bride, lived with us till the old baron
thought it fit to give Meeta his blessing and some
money — how Tom Fane wished no good to the pedlar's
eyes — and lastly, how Miss Isabella Slingsby lived
and died wondering what earthly motive I could have
for my absurd share in these events, are matters of
which I spare you the particulars.